Everyday links

There are a lot of websites that I visit on a daily basis, and I’ve laid them all out here for you to benefit.

videocopilot.net – I think Andrew Kramer does a fantastic job showing you how to learn VFX in bite sized chunks that you can always go back and reference, and his plug-ins are worth more than he’s selling them for. They’re great. Definitely check his website out.

slickdeals.net – If I need something I’m searching here first. Deals are updated regularly by the community, and they’ll let you know if a deal is truly slick or not. Mostly the comments are “better deal on black Friday” and the like, but if you’re looking for a camera, lens, computer parts, or a gift for your mom even though other plans got in the way, they’ll be sure to let you know where to find the best deals without rebates or how to get them on the secondary market for cheaper.

pcpartpicker.com – This is the BEST site for picking out components for your PC. It compares components against each other to let you know that if you’re picking an 2011-3 cpu and an 1151 motherboard you’re gonna have a bad time. There is a check box you have to uncheck to even see incompatible hardware, I mean, to do any more it would have to read your mind and pick out the parts for you! Beyond that it gives you the recent breakdown of how much each component costs from various websites over the last few months and offers you the current price from a few websites like Amazon, newegg, ncix, and microcenter.

cpuboss.com – Cpuboss hosts the community’s cpu benchmarks and helps you to compare them against another cpu. The benchmarks don’t mean much if you don’t know what you’re looking for as the test between the 6700k and 5820k seem like the 6700k is better, it’s actually not for editors.

nofilmschool.com – This is a blog about everything film making. Some stuff is really invaluable, other stuff is kinda meh. News about cameras coming out, the newest stuff at CES, NAB, or whatever convention is great, but rinse and repeat. There’s too much convention coverage, and new blah blah item announcement stuff on many blogs that I just don’t care for.

youtube.com

film riot- Pretty awesome. Ryan Connolly and crew make great shorts then teaches you how they did them. They have DIY projects, tips, and Q&A segments. All pretty interesting stuff that I’m sure you’ll find bits pretty useful.

indymogul – Old indymogul stuff with Erik Beck was great. It was what got me into making movies. They showed off ways you could make your own props, sets, effects, and got into digital audio, vfx and a lot of other really great things. Sadly it’s cancelled now.

brandonjla – breakdowns of the freddieW stuff, intro to 3ds Max, and hoverjunkers from inception to release.

rocketjumpfilmschool – Not a huge fan of FreddieW’s stuff post Brandon, but the filmschool stuff is pretty awesome. Pick and choose what’s right for you and you’ll want to know more about the subject… then google it.

linustechtips – If there’s something you want to know about computers Linus packages it in interesting and well paced nuggets between sponsorship time.

theFilmTheorist – MatPat is love. MatPat is life. Seriously. He’s funny and has a bunch of fun theories that make you think and have fun.

zvork.fr/vls/ – This site is amazing. If you need help understanding concepts of lighting, or want to test out a look before hiring a model this is free and easy to use and understand.

creativecow.net – If you’re stuck on how to create an effect or edit you could come here, but more than likely you’ll get some bad advice from someone who hasn’t used the right version of your chosen program, or they’ll tell you that you should have gotten it during shooting. Read a lot, reference it to more current solutions, then yell at yourself that there was an easier way to do that in your brain.

Wikipedia – I research a lot of different things and this is always the place I go if I’m having a hard time finding the answer. I know Wiki is frowned upon in the academic world, but they’re wrong. Wikipedia requires citations. Those little numbers next to sentences? Citations, usually in print. Follow those citations and you’ll find yourself evidence to make actual claims on. No not every citation is valid, but there should be a good number of citations to use, or at least follow.